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What about hydro on natural waterfalls? No space lost. No dam-failure risk. I don't think every rainy mountain is fully tapped. True, they aren't everywhere
by dspeyer 16y ago
What about hydro on natural waterfalls? No space lost. No dam-failure risk. I don't think every rainy mountain is fully tapped.
True, they aren't everywhere. Maybe some of the power-intensive industry can move to them.
- nitrogen 16y agoFortunately people tend to like waterfalls for their aesthetic value so much that they would never allow industrial processing or power plants near them. I would like to see calculations on how much theoretical power could be obtained from all sources if there were no limits, i.e. every river dammed, every waterfall harnessed, every atom of uranium split, every atom of silicon and necessary rare earths turned into solar panels, every acre of desert used in molten salt solar collectors, etc.
- dspeyer 16y agoDoesn't seem to be a problem and Niagara (2.5GW) or Snoqualmie (54MW). Both are still popular with tourists (obviously, Snoqualmie is not on Niagara's scale in either power or tourism, but I include it because I imagine there are a lot of Snoqualmie-sized waterfalls yet untapped, and probably no Niagara-sized).
- adrianN 16y agoI strongly doubt that you can generate more than 0.1% of our power requirements from that source. The world uses 17 trillion kilowatt hours per year, that's 1900 Gigawatts.